Page 68 of Born in the Spring

“Youare my concern.”

“Honey. . .” Her tone now is a soft warning for me to stop, and an attempt to comfort as I’m already seeing what she didn’t want me to.

They’re not business papers.

They’re divorce papers.

Dad’s finally serving her divorce papers, giving us that clean severing I prayed for, and he can’t even show his face.

I asked for this, and here it is, but I still have to lean against the bar to hold myself up.

I’m trapped in a fog that gets mistier the more I try to read, words running off the page once I get down to the bottom, withhis name, and his signature.

Mom didn’t ask for this. Myhurtasked for this, and now I’m cinching the end of another life in ours between my fingers, the edges cutting into my palms.

Inever wanted this. I didn’t want him to walk out on us, stirring a hatred in me I’d never felt in the first place.

I didn’t want us to lose him.

I didn’t want us to lose Shepherd.

Someone—Mom tries to work the papers from my fingers, and I let them go once I’m aware, my surroundings filtering loud through my ears, with the pumping of my blood, as a familiar sickness churns in my gut.

Her voice now reaches for me, but it’s the voices near my back that my sanity fizzles to.

“You’re so lame at this.”

My insides wince in agreement as if the kid’s talking to me.

I shouldn’t feel like this is my fault. Again. Still.

“You keep hitting the tree.”

“Well, that’s what he did in real life.”

A laugh.

A realization that makes me sicker.

Aragerising up.

My body is a tightrope, and I snap at the sound of Mom’s sniffle. My name is clear from her mouth, a cry to pull me back, but I’m already standing in front of the guy poking fun at my brother’s death and ripping his means to do so from his hands. The phone then shatters to the floor.

“Have some fucking respect!”

A yell. From me.

Low gasps, from everyone else, the entire room simmering to silence as I boil under their stares.

It’s when the kid stutters out an, “I’m sorry,” that I sink where I’m standing, my legs stiffened to aching in their attempt to hold me up. My lungs seize as I look around, stilled bodies blurring in and out of my vision, a tilt in the atmosphere, in me, as I lose air.

And I can’t take more in and I can’t right myself underthiskind of attention.

I’m escaping to the back, stumbling fast through the kitchen area and shoving past the double doors to fall back against the wall just outside the restrooms.

I lose time.

I’m losing.

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